Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2015, Page 9

Orri Vésteinsson
EDITORIAL
In the final piece of this eleventh volume
of Archaeologia islandica the former edi-
tor, Professor Gavin Lucas, translates and
publishes an interview with Gordon Chil-
de taken by renowned Icelandic historian
Björn Þorsteinsson in 1956. It comes out
clearly that Icelandic archaeology had not
made much of an impression on Childe,
and the two scholars found more common
ground talking about politics than the past.
Yet 1956 was the very year modern Icelan-
dic archaeology can be said to have come
of age. It was the year Kristján Eldjárn pub-
lished and defended his doctoral thesis,
Kuml og haugfé - which is still the hand-
book of Icelandic Viking Age archaeology
- and the year when the Viking congress
visited Iceland for the first time. The pro-
ceedings, published two years later (Þriðji
víkingafundur - Third Viking Congress,
Reykjavík 1956, Reykjavík 1958), contained
what amount to mission statements by
the most influential scholars of Icelandic
archaeology at the time: Kristján Eldjárn,
Sigurður Þórarinsson and Jón Steffensen.
All three were applying modern, scientific
methods to new fields of inquiry, discard-
ing the old discourses of earlier generations
of antiquarians with hardly a backward
glance and boldly staking claims to new
kinds of knowledge and reasoning. How
any of this struck Gordon Childe we do
not learn from the interview and it seems
that the view, prevalent at the time, that
there was no prehistoric phase in Iceland,
meant that no one, himself included, felt
that Childe could be expected to have an
opinion on, or more than polite interest in,
Icelandic archaeology. However, as Björn
Þorsteinsson is at some pains to point out
in the interview, prehistory mattered. In
Björn’s view this was not so much because
there was any prehistory in Iceland, but be-
cause Icelandic history and origins could
only be understood by considering it in the
context of the prehistory of northern Eu-
rope. Icelandic history did not begin and
spring out of nothing; it had an Iron Age,
northern European context that could and
should be explored by Icelandic scholars in
order to throw light on the Icelandic case.
This is a view few would disparage nowa-
days although it surprisingly rarely guides
actual practice.
To the generations of archaeologists
that came after Kristján Eldjárn and his